"If we had a division to-morrow, within a few years or so the most
efficient would contrive to get the bulk of it back in their hands."
"That's so," he admitted. "But we're not going to have a division
to-morrow."
"Thank God!" I exclaimed.
He regarded me.
"The 'efficient' will have to die or be educated first. That will take
time."
"Educated!"
"Paret, have you ever read any serious books on what you call socialism?"
he asked.
I threw out an impatient negative. I was going on to protest that I was
not ignorant of the doctrine.
"Oh, what you call socialism is merely what you believe to be the more or
less crude and utopian propaganda of an obscure political party. That
isn't socialism. Nor is the anomalistic attempt that the Christian
Socialists make to unite modern socialistic philosophy with Christian
orthodoxy, socialism."
"What is socialism, then?" I demanded, somewhat defiantly.
"Let's call it education, science," he said smilingly, "economics and
government based on human needs and a rational view of religion. It has
been taught in German universities, and it will be taught in ours
whenever we shall succeed in inducing your friends, by one means or
another, not to continue endowing them. Socialism, in the proper sense,
is merely the application of modern science to government."
I was puzzled and angry. What he said made sense somehow, but it sounded
to me like so much gibberish.
"But Germany is a monarchy," I objected.
"It is a modern, scientific system with monarchy as its superstructure.
It is anomalous, but frank. The monarchy is there for all men to see, and
some day it will be done away with. We are supposedly a democracy, and
our superstructure is plutocratic. Our people feel the burden, but they
have not yet discovered what the burden is."
"And when they do?" I asked, a little defiantly.
"When they do," replied Krebs, "they will set about making the plutocrats
happy. Now plutocrats are discontented, and never satisfied; the more
they get, the more they want, the more they are troubled by what other
people have."